Cause Fear
Description Cause Fear makes a target with 5 hit dice, or less, more fearful resulting in a -2 penalty on attack, damage and saving throws, and forcing them to take no action other then to run away from nearby creatures. Bug Notes *NW_S0_CauseFear has no mention, or effect, of 6 seconds of fear even if the save is successful. The description is very off! The script simply has no way anything is applied if the save is successful. *If the random roll returns 1 round (=6.0 seconds) and no metamagic duration mods are applied, the duration actually must be artificially increased to 9 seconds due to the way spellcasting works in NWN2 (see True Strike spell for details), otherwise the saving throw decrease will wear off before you can cast another spell. *Line 47: The description also doesn't say the saving throw decrease is only for will saves made against mind spells. The script specifically defines on line 47 as: effect eSave = EffectSavingThrowDecrease(SAVING_THROW_WILL, 2, SAVING_THROW_TYPE_MIND_SPELLS); *Line 46: It also does cause Fear, EffectFrightened() is used - meaning NW_G0_FEAR is fired on heartbeat, making them run away. This seems unintentional - perhaps copied from Scare. Or the description is wrong. *Even if a target is immune to fear or mind-affecting spells in general, they still suffer the penalties (attack decrease etc.) if they fail the saving throw. The spell Scare suffers from exactly the same problem. This is probably due to the fact that originally the spell was supposed to work differently (no fear effect, just penalties), but was changed later on, yet the original scripting was not removed from the script. See Scare bugs section for more details. Description parts wrong. Old description: :Will partial :Cause Fear makes a target with 5 hit dice, or less, more fearful resulting in a -2 penalty on attack, damage and saving throws. If the creature makes the spell's saving throw then this condition only lasts for 6 seconds. Has been changed to match the script like so: :Will negates :Cause Fear makes a target with 5 hit dice, or less, more fearful resulting in a -2 penalty on attack, damage and saving throws, and forcing them to take no action other then to run away from nearby creatures. Gameplay Notes This spell is generally pretty poor past anything after level 3, due to its low duration of effects and other similar spells which are much better - like Scare. For some reason it is limited to 1d4 rounds - which while at level 1 gives a greater chance of it lasting more then just 6 seconds, at higher levels, it is really a short duration (at level 4, where as with spells with 1 round/level duration you'd get 24 seconds, with this, you'd get 6, 12, 18 or 24 seconds randomly). Metamagic applies to the duration it seems. The effects, however, are quite nice. -2 to hit, damage, and saving throws, can add up to cripple a low level monster, especially a melee-attacking one. Due to its low duration it is a spell to avoid however. NWN1 comparison NWN1 had the spell Doom, Obsidian renamed it to be inline with the 3.5E rules. It also lasted longer - 1 minute / level, instead of 1d4 rounds. External resources *NWNWiki:Doom - NWN1's version of this spell. *d20 SRD Cause Fear Category:Spells that can be Persisted